"It Always Begins with Language": A Conversation with Molly Spencer

Marisa Emily Siegel

June 11

I've known Molly Spencer for nearly a decade; we first met when Molly joined the editorial team at The Rumpus in 2016. We struck a fast friendship that's grown over the years and is centered around a shared sensibility about poetics, publishing, and our place in and connection to the larger world we inhabit.

In her third full-length collection, Invitatory, Molly mines the liminal for a deeper understanding of that larger world. Her tools here are not chisel and pickaxe but line and language. Returning again and again to thresholds, to spaces of departure and approach, the poems are recursive and generative all at once, allowing readers to linger amid its rich imagistic spaces.

It was a pleasure to spend time with Molly on Zoom last month to discuss this incandescent new work.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Marisa Siegel

Where did Invitatory begin—or more generally, how does a collection come together for you?

Molly Spencer

It's always hard for me to talk about where or when a group of poems starts becoming a manuscript or how a collection comes together, because of course you don't really know when you first start working on a set of poems that might be in conversation with each other what might come of it. It takes me a while to get to the point where I think, Yes, this might turn into a book. My first impulse is to resist. To not write the poem, and then to not write the next poem—to not write the collection. But if the poems won't leave me alone, I relent.

Marisa Siegel

Is that resistance about self-doubt, or is it part of your crafting process?

Molly Spencer

The way a poem usually arrives for me is, as I'm reading or walking through my neighborhood, some language, or sometimes an image, will arrive and stick in my brain. I think of them as scraps of language or image that present themselves to me. When this happens my first impulse is to think, I'm not writing that.

I don't trust an idea if it goes away after that initial resistance, but I know I have to write something when the scrap of language or image won't leave me alone. I really don't feel like I need to write a poem for every bit of language or every image; like most poets, language and image follow me constantly. I think my resistance filters out much of what wouldn't cohere into a collection.

Marisa Siegel

What makes a certain scrap of language stick?

Molly Spencer

I don't need to feel a personal connection to the language, but I need to be interested in it. I think this often means it's an unexpected bit of language or image—it needs to be a little strange. It has to bother me enough to convince me that the only way to stop it from bothering me is to engage with it in writing.

The first scrap of language that came to me in what became Invitatory is in the first of the "Invitatory" series, which begins, "Considering our momentary nearness." That language arrived on a night in 2010 on which the Earth and Jupiter were closer to each other than they would be again until 2022. I'd just put my little ones to bed, and went outside to see if I could find Jupiter in the night sky, and these words presented themselves to me. And persisted.

Marisa Siegel

The eponymous series of "Invitatory" poems is at the heart of the book. What is the Invitatory?

Molly Spencer

The Invitatory is part of the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, a cycle of prayers said throughout the day; it's a morning psalm, the day's first call to believers to come before the sacred.

I resisted making Invitatory the book's title. I knew that many readers wouldn't know what it was; many Catholics don't! But it is the title that best fits the collection because it speaks to a drawing together, an invitation to live deeply and intentionally; to confront the world—both its beauty and its horrors—and ourselves in it. My way of doing that is through language and the craft of poetry.

Marisa Siegel

Do you imagine a future reader when you're composing?

Molly Spencer

No. I follow the language. I work toward what the poem is asking to be, not what potential readers or I want it to be.

Marisa Siegel

I'm looking at the thesaurus behind you and wondering, too, if it ever looks like research?

Molly Spencer

[Laughs] I do so much etymological research! It's a very generative source for me and it's also an important revision tool.

For many of the poems in this collection, especially the "Invitatory" series, I also ended up doing historical research—which mainly means that I came across an interesting piece of information and read more about it. Each of the "Invitatory" poems is informed by either something that was happening in the world when I wrote it, or some historical fact that caught my attention. The migration crisis is present in more than one poem. I came across an article on the oldest human-woven garment that archaeologists had found, and so another poem began with that idea clinking around in my head. Some of the poems began with geological phenomena: when we lived in California, we'd get a little shake every now and then—nothing major—and so one poem grew out of one of those little earthquakes—the jolt under my feet as I was preparing dinner and listening to NPR report the death count in Afghanistan.

So, perhaps it's not strictly historical research but an attentiveness to what is happening at the moment, to what catches my interest as I move through my days.

Marisa Siegel

Talk to me about the natural landscapes that appear in Invitatory.

Molly Spencer

As a Michigander who grew up spending summers camping at the shore of what we call "the big lake" (Lake Michigan), the Michigan landscape is certainly present. Also present is the landscape of the Oregon coast; I'd vacation there with my kids when we lived in California. The near obliteration I felt as a kid staring out at the horizon at Lake Michigan, and now feel standing at the edge of the Pacific, is an animating force in Invitatory.

In both places, there are a lot of freighters and ships making their way across the waters. I spent my childhood and teenage years watching freighters: wondering what was on them, wondering what their path would be, figuring out if they were "upbound" or "downbound." Later, in California and Oregon, it was enormous container ships. So, in Invitatory, there are a lot of ships that might be crossing, or appear to be crossing, or that we know to be crossing but don't appear to be. Even as a child watching freighters, I understood I was trying to see, trying to puzzle out the mystery of perception. So, I've long been interested in the slips and gaps in perception that occur when we stare out at the horizon. The water, and the horizon, and what happens at it and beyond it, and whether or not we can really perceive it are a big part of my sensibility as a poet.

Marisa Siegel

Are there other poets, other artists, baked into this collection?

Molly Spencer

I never quite understand how other poets' poems help me find mine, but they do. For Invitatory, Jorie Graham's work was very important. Many years ago, I had read The End of Beauty and was very interested in it, but couldn't quite get my head around it. I pulled it back out in 2017, and this time, it just exploded my mind—Materialism, too. I read these two texts again and again while I worked on these poems, so I consider them to be the midwives of Invitatory.

Marisa Siegel

What about Jorie's work do you think allowed for that?

Molly Spencer

Partly some of the craft elements she uses in those books—her long sprawling lines. The use of accumulation and suspension and non-sequitur and quick reversal in thought. Her work showed me things I could do in a poem that I hadn't done before, and which felt necessary to the poems in Invitatory.

Jorie's work is sublime, really, in terms of being heavenly, celestial. The depths and infinities she opens up and the way she uses the line to think aloud and to pursue intellectual inquiry amaze me. Also, she is a poet of perception. She documents and interrogates her own perceptions of the world—in this way, she's self-skeptical. That seems important to me because I am a self-skeptical person; I like to question myself and my perceptions. Her work showed me how to do that on the page.

I was also re-reading Dionne Brand's Inventory as I wrote these poems. Her use of form and her refusal to abandon the personal amid the political really helped me figure how to write and present the title series.

And then, my oldest and dearest poets are Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, and Louise Glück. Dickinson's unconventional sparring with the Divine; Heaney's place-rich diction; and Glück's reticence—all of this is always in me and in my poems. And I was able to indulge in that more in this collection than in my previous work, in those unusual ways of sparring with whatever great mystery brings us all here, and in pursuing language and exploring its capabilities and failures.

Marisa Siegel

Is it about trusting yourself more as a poet?

Molly Spencer

Yes. I think this is especially true about giving in to reticence and gaps. I used to feel uncomfortable not saying the thing, but now I just let the gaps be. I make leaps and leave a lot unexplained. I finally gave into that impulse, which I admire so much in Glück's work, in Invitatory.

Marisa Siegel

I'm curious what you see as the throughlines across your three books, and what's changed?

Molly Spencer

Well, certainly an interest in language, but I am not a poet who can keep writing the same kinds of poems over and over. In Hinge, I wrote a lot of retellings of myth and fairy tale and folklore, maybe because I was steeped in that language when I was writing those poems—my children were small; we read together a lot! Those poems are much more narrative than what I write now. If the House was somewhat of a departure—it was less narrative, and I was a bit more comfortable being reticent. It was still rooted in my own lived experience, but I began to depart more from that; I think there are seeds of Invitatory in If the House.

To a far greater extent than my other books, the poems in Invitatory are tied tightly to each other. They are talking to each other, and the reader is perhaps overhearing their conversation.

Maybe the throughline is trying different things on the page and trusting myself to do that.

Marisa Siegel

And it always begins with language?

Molly Spencer

It always begins with language. The language comes first. And then the line—without the line, without a way to stop the language, I'd be lost.

Marisa Siegel

How do you know when you're finished with a book, or an individual poem? Is it just a matter of deciding to call it finished?

Molly Spencer

I get to a point where the poem (or book) is done with me. I don't set out for perfection; I set out to write the poem that wants to be written. From there, I am led by language and craft to get that poem into the best shape I can. It's the same process with working on a collection. And of course, there's a little mystery in all of it, isn't there?